Headscratchers / Fargo: Season Two

Remember that spoilers are unmarked in Headscratchers pages.

• Why Lou and Hank allowed Ed to run away without giving some sort of an effort to chase him?
  • Hanks says that they "know where he's going," which is back home. As I recall, they make a passing mention about how they didn't expect him to hightail it back out of there so fast and slip away.
• Why did the Gerhardts send Virgil and Charlie to kill Ed at the butcher shop, rather than have Hanzee deal with it?
  • The Gerhardts have plenty of killers. Plus, they don't seem to realize quite how much more competent Hanzee is than any of them.
    • Additionally, Charlie convinced his uncle that a member of the family should be the one kill Ed, rather than a hired gun.
• What exactly are Peggy's provable crimes? There's the hit-and-run (which police seem to think was Ed's doing) and obstruction of justice. Isn't that pretty much it? While she set some majorly destructive events in motion, every killing was done by someone else, and things like injuring or assaulting people could all be argued as self-defense.
  • There's one big crime she committed that they can prove: Kidnapping Dodd Gerhardt. While he did attack her in their house, immediately bounding and gagging said attacker and holding him for ransom/leverage is beyond illegal. It also doesn't help that Dodd was killed while being held by the Blumquists; under Minnesota law, this allows the judge to sentence her for an even longer jail sentence because her and Ed's actions (albeit indirectly) led to the circumstances of Dodd's death. Granted, she may get off easy if she's got a good defense attorney, who might try to convince the jury that Ed strong-armed her into doing the kidnapping or merely bring up how a dangerous mass-murdering criminal was the one who actually did the deed (Hanzee). But given how the police will be able to prove that Peggy was stabbing Dodd in the chest before he died (they likely have the knife used as evidence, with both his blood and Peggy's fingerprints on it) and her suspicious behavior before the kidnapping, she's likely to get some form of jail time even if it's not the maximum sentence.
• When Hank woke up on the porch and spoke to the dispatcher and was told about the siege at the precinct, did he just get in his car and drive off without thinking to check on Peggy and what happened to the Gerhardts that were there when Hanzee knocked him out?
  • Even if he'd left without checking on her, Peggy would still have had plenty of opportunity to call the cops and tell them that she'd captured Dodd. She never does so. Instead, she and Ed kidnap Dodd and use him as a bargaining chip. Knowing that, we can infer that this was what they preferred to do. So if Hank did check up on Peggy, then she concealed the fact that she had captured Dodd from Hank.
• After the Gerhardts were officially wiped out thanks to him, why didn't (Hanzee) let Peggy and Ed live and go about their business while he went about his?
  • The narrator of episode 9 actually acknowledges this, remarking that nobody is quite sure why Hanzee went after Peggy and Ed. The most plausible explanation the narrator gives is that Hanzee wanted to get rid of the two people that saw his 'true' colors when he asked Peggy to cut his hair after he killed Dodd. This was a moment of weakness for Hanzee, and he wanted to make sure nobody remained who could remember that brief moment he revealed his self-hatred.
• Why was Rye sent to intimidate the judge?
  • He wants her to unfreeze the assets of his business partner Skip, the guy with the electric typewriters and gambling debts.
• What happened to the other Gerhardt children? Dodd said that he has 4 daughters, and some of the earlier scenes had younger children running around the house. They aren't much after, but they were there.
  • I believe Dodd's wife is still alive, though I don't think we ever see her. Dodd's other daughters would go to her. If she's dead or gone, they would either be given to the nearest Gerhardt relative, get taken in by one of the family's various minions, or be sent to a foster family.
• Why did Hanzee spare Gale but kill Wayne when he caught up to the Kitchen Brothers?
  • For starters, someone had to send the message to Mike Milligan that the Gerhardts won't roll over without a fight. It also is crueler than killing both: kill one twin and let the other live out the rest of his days without his other half. Just like happens later on with Mr. Wrench and Mr. Numbers.
• So how is Hanzee Dent going to be able to go from being a side contract killer and enforcer of the Gerhardts to Moses Tripoli, head of the Fargo syndicate?
  • Either Hanzee will kill enough Kansas City representatives to take back control of the Gerhardt's old territory, or else he'll simply side with Kansas City. Probably the latter, since Tripoli in 2006 is dealing with accountants and other irritations that smack of what Mike Milligan was being told to deal with when he got his own Kansas City promotion.
• So what were Kansas City intending when sending the Undertaker? Was the Undertaker going to just take over the job, and Mike would be fired or demoted? Or was he there to kill Mike? The somber music as the Undertaker approaches the suite implies the latter, but the former is just as possible, and Mike was so ambitious that he killed him just to keep the job.
  • The Narrator in episode nine says that the Undertaker would have killed Mike had Mike not killed him first. We don't know whether Mike knew that his life was on the line or whether he just killed the Undertaker to maintain his position of authority. The Undertaker clearly didn't expect Mike to realize that he was going to be killed, since was taken totally by surprise when Mike attacked him.
• When the Blumquists are running from Hanzee after the Sioux Falls Massacre, neither are injured. They flag down a motorist, but he gets shot, so they run down an alley, where Ed gets shot. Later, Lou finds a trail of blood going from the open door of the dead motorist's car down the alley. If Ed was shot midway down the alley, why did the blood trail start at the car?